[cstrahan]

I think your response is resulting in so much disagreement in the comments due to differences in how this quote is parsed:

> On average in relationships, women's greatest value is their youth and beauty (early/mid 20s), men's greatest value is when they've progressed in their career and are amassing wealth (mid/late 30s).

Particularly what the word “value” means in this context.

I suspect you take “value” to mean something like “is deserving of positive self esteem; worthy of positive sentiment/respect/love”.

I, and I suspect most others here in the comments, take “value” to mean something very different; roughly: “that which is statistically pursued and/or desired by others”. In this sense, it can be said that (within certain circles) sticking a needle in your arm and checking out of your life is valued. That says nothing of how you and I feel about others doing that, whether that’s healthy/moral/ethical/whatever behavior, etc. The statistics regarding the pursuit of a thing and the sentiment regarding the former are orthogonal. This is, for example, what is meant by “value” when speaking of supply/demand.

If you look at what men want (and in my experience as a heterosexual male looking at dating prospects, what women also want — much to my detriment as a man who is uninterested in having children), it usually includes having healthy, well supported (financially and emotionally) children. While I am kind, giving, ambitious, funny, etc, I am reduced to zero “value” (i.e. they have no point in pursuing me because I won’t ever give them what they want) in the eyes of 99% of the single women where I live. And that’s fine to me, as we all have things that we want, and there’s no one in existence that will check the boxes off for everyone else in the universe. That doesn’t mean that my own self esteem should be diminished, and I don’t think most people would want me to have any less self esteem.

[maxbond]

I take "value" in that sentence to mean "worth".

I think supply and demand is a bad way to look at it. Dating isn't a "market" in the sense that an auction is conducted to discover the value of goods. If you find someone you're happy with, you can't leverage that to find someone you're even more happy with, in the way that if you made a good trade in a market you'd have capital to conduct more trades with.

This model of dating relies on flattening people so that they can be considered fungible, but dating is about how someone's idiosyncracies complement your own. Markets rely on there being a ground truth of how valuable something is, and for every participant to bring their information about that to the marketplace. But in dating, one pair of people might be toxic and horrible, and those same people might do great with other partners - it's far too murky and subjective to be reduced to a market.

[cstrahan]

> If you find someone you're happy with, you can't leverage that to find someone you're even more happy with, in the way that if you made a good trade in a market you'd have capital to conduct more trades with.

I agree with this.

Though I also don't think anyone is really trying to suggest (express or implied) that there's a general, natural analogy to be made between dating and markets; I solely think the word "value" was being used in the economical sense, without implying any further connection to economic theory. I realize that, when I suggested that "value" was probably meant in the sense of supply/demand, I may have conveyed something I wasn't trying to; sorry about that.

At any rate, this is how I and most people within both my family and social circles have used "value" in conversation: not an expression of sentiment, but merely an observation of what others want. Given this meaning, it's actually nonsensical to speak of a person's value without any supporting context -- people don't have value any more than the color green has smoothness/roughness, or the a note played on a piano is righteous/unjust -- these descriptors just don't apply. I could say that my skills within my career field are valued, and I suppose I could restate that as "I am a valuable employee", but I myself have no intrinsic value. If you read that with "value" replaced with "self worth" (by which people generally would mean something like "self esteem"), then it sounds pretty bad -- but that's not what's meant. I suspect most people in the HN demographic also use "value" pretty consistently in the way I've suggested -- not that I'm trying to make the argument that "value" should be interpreted this way or that way, but just pointing out what I think I've seen in practice.

I think what was originally suggested upstream in the comments was that there are qualities that most men happen to be looking for (are "valued"/"valuable"), and that those qualities give rise to pressures (as unfortunate as they may be) on women to find a long term / life partner sooner than later.